That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor (37 page)
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Authors: Anne Sebba
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Royalty, #Rich & Famous
BOOK: That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
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Fiction, too, often exaggerates the unbelievable in order to help us understand whatever appears strange in a life and in literature. Any mention of ‘Mrs Simpson’, as she was henceforth generally known to history, soon became shorthand for a certain type of woman. As early as 1960 Anthony Powell in
Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant
, the fifth in his twelve-volume
Dance to the Music of Time
, found her compelling as a minor character off. For the awkward, faintly ludicrous Kenneth Widmerpool, a meeting with Mrs Simpson in the 1930s supplies him with lustre; he can talk of nothing else and sees himself as a result as a man of the world. It is perhaps easier for novelists than playwrights to look at the mismatch between public glamour and private anguish by exploring the dark heart of what it was like to be Wallis Simpson. Actors including Faye Dunaway, Nichola McAuliffe, Joely Richardson and Andrea Riseborough have all found Wallis a most challenging and satisfying role, and there is no shortage of those who want to interpret That Woman. But, as theatre critic Dominic Maxwell, reviewing one of the latest attempts to put Wallis on stage, noted, however full of humour and panache, any play on the subject risks suffering from a necessary frenzy of facts when what is wanted is feelings.
Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant
, the fifth in his twelve-volume
Dance to the Music of Time
, found her compelling as a minor character off. For the awkward, faintly ludicrous Kenneth Widmerpool, a meeting with Mrs Simpson in the 1930s supplies him with lustre; he can talk of nothing else and sees himself as a result as a man of the world. It is perhaps easier for novelists than playwrights to look at the mismatch between public glamour and private anguish by exploring the dark heart of what it was like to be Wallis Simpson. Actors including Faye Dunaway, Nichola McAuliffe, Joely Richardson and Andrea Riseborough have all found Wallis a most challenging and satisfying role, and there is no shortage of those who want to interpret That Woman. But, as theatre critic Dominic Maxwell, reviewing one of the latest attempts to put Wallis on stage, noted, however full of humour and panache, any play on the subject risks suffering from a necessary frenzy of facts when what is wanted is feelings.
The ‘facts’ were soon supplied by the official histories and biographies. Frances Donaldson started work on her official biography of Edward VIII as early as 1969, when many of the main protagonists, as well as her subject, were still alive, with obvious advantages and disadvantages. Her account, published in 1974 two years after the Duke’s death, was justly praised and provided the basis for the 1978 British television series
Edward and Mrs Simpson
, to which Maître Blum strongly objected – in vain. Mary Kirk’s sister Buckie belatedly wrote to Lady Donaldson wishing to discuss what she believed were important areas ‘upon which I could throw a little more light’. Her twenty-four-page account was never used, but Buckie’s insight has informed my understanding of the role the Kirk sisterse Khro played in Wallis’s life.
Edward and Mrs Simpson
, to which Maître Blum strongly objected – in vain. Mary Kirk’s sister Buckie belatedly wrote to Lady Donaldson wishing to discuss what she believed were important areas ‘upon which I could throw a little more light’. Her twenty-four-page account was never used, but Buckie’s insight has informed my understanding of the role the Kirk sisterse Khro played in Wallis’s life.
Sharply aware of the limitations of authorized works, the British essayist and novelist William Boyd wrote a ‘fictional autobiography’
Any Human Heart
(2002), in which Logan Mountstuart journeys through the entire twentieth century. Boyd devotes a considerable part of his story to the latter’s meetings with, and ultimate betrayal by, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Boyd is intrigued not only by the dark heart of Wallis herself but by the darkness surrounding her. He not only recognizes the Windsors’ selfishness and obliviousness of those around them but sees how, in marrying the Duke, the Duchess swallowed a form of poison which slowly corroded both their lives. Boyd is especially interested in what he perceives as the Duke’s duplicitous role when, as governor of the Bahamas in 1943, he colluded with corrupt detectives in order to ‘solve’ the Oakes murder case, thereby perverting the course of justice and risking the death of an innocent man. To what extent was his conscience troubled and, if not troubled unduly, what sort of woman can devote her life to such a man, he asks? Although the novel was published in 2002, long after his protagonists were dead, Boyd has written both fiction and non-fiction about the Duke and Duchess, undertaking, as any historian must, months of research ‘poring over photographs and memoirs and generally trying to get inside their heads … to imagine them into life’. Yet he believes there is a greater truth available to the novelist who tells his story well. His is a damning portrait which does little to rehabilitate the pair.
Any Human Heart
(2002), in which Logan Mountstuart journeys through the entire twentieth century. Boyd devotes a considerable part of his story to the latter’s meetings with, and ultimate betrayal by, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Boyd is intrigued not only by the dark heart of Wallis herself but by the darkness surrounding her. He not only recognizes the Windsors’ selfishness and obliviousness of those around them but sees how, in marrying the Duke, the Duchess swallowed a form of poison which slowly corroded both their lives. Boyd is especially interested in what he perceives as the Duke’s duplicitous role when, as governor of the Bahamas in 1943, he colluded with corrupt detectives in order to ‘solve’ the Oakes murder case, thereby perverting the course of justice and risking the death of an innocent man. To what extent was his conscience troubled and, if not troubled unduly, what sort of woman can devote her life to such a man, he asks? Although the novel was published in 2002, long after his protagonists were dead, Boyd has written both fiction and non-fiction about the Duke and Duchess, undertaking, as any historian must, months of research ‘poring over photographs and memoirs and generally trying to get inside their heads … to imagine them into life’. Yet he believes there is a greater truth available to the novelist who tells his story well. His is a damning portrait which does little to rehabilitate the pair.
Other novelists of various nationalities have been attracted not merely by the vivid personalities of the Duke and Duchess but by the dramatic history swirling around them in the 1930s. Timothey Findley, the Canadian author of
Famous Last Words
(1981), wrote of the Duke and Duchess prepared during the war to sell their souls to the devil. In Findley’s hands Wallis, learning that the Duke had abdicated, reacts with hatred. ‘I hate him,’ she says repeatedly. ‘I do, I hate him.’ Of course the hatred was necessary for the novelist’s plot, which sees the Windsors conspire with Ribbentrop to overthrow Hitler, assume control of the Nazi Party and plan a takeover of Europe. And indeed there were, in real time, moments when something very close to hatred came perilously close to the surface. Perry Brownlow, who knew both the Duke and Duchess well, suspected that living with Wallis taught the Duke to lie. But as a young man the Duke had insisted to Freda Dudley Ward: ‘I feel more and more strongly that it’s absolutely legitimate to lie and that we are more than within our rights to do so when it concerns our own private affairs, angel.’ Perhaps living with Wallis strengthened the toxic mix. More recently the Spanish novelist Javier Marías, in the first part of his trilogy
Your Face Tomorrow
, tells the story of the glamorous naval intelligence officer Sir Peter Russell, thinly disguised as Sir Peter Wheeler, who acted as custodian, companion, escort and even sword of Damocles to the Duke and Duchess, ‘that frivolous pair … not prepared to go into exile … without her wardrobe, her table linen, her royal bed linen, her silver and her porcelain dinner service’. Wheeler in the story insists that the Duchess ‘wasn’t that ugly … well she was, but there was something troubling about her too’. In order to ensure that his charges arrived safely in the Bahamas in 1940 Wheeler was issued with a revolver not simply for use against the Germans. ‘No, we understood that we should use those pistols against the Duke and Duchess. Better dead than in Hitler’s hands.’
Famous Last Words
(1981), wrote of the Duke and Duchess prepared during the war to sell their souls to the devil. In Findley’s hands Wallis, learning that the Duke had abdicated, reacts with hatred. ‘I hate him,’ she says repeatedly. ‘I do, I hate him.’ Of course the hatred was necessary for the novelist’s plot, which sees the Windsors conspire with Ribbentrop to overthrow Hitler, assume control of the Nazi Party and plan a takeover of Europe. And indeed there were, in real time, moments when something very close to hatred came perilously close to the surface. Perry Brownlow, who knew both the Duke and Duchess well, suspected that living with Wallis taught the Duke to lie. But as a young man the Duke had insisted to Freda Dudley Ward: ‘I feel more and more strongly that it’s absolutely legitimate to lie and that we are more than within our rights to do so when it concerns our own private affairs, angel.’ Perhaps living with Wallis strengthened the toxic mix. More recently the Spanish novelist Javier Marías, in the first part of his trilogy
Your Face Tomorrow
, tells the story of the glamorous naval intelligence officer Sir Peter Russell, thinly disguised as Sir Peter Wheeler, who acted as custodian, companion, escort and even sword of Damocles to the Duke and Duchess, ‘that frivolous pair … not prepared to go into exile … without her wardrobe, her table linen, her royal bed linen, her silver and her porcelain dinner service’. Wheeler in the story insists that the Duchess ‘wasn’t that ugly … well she was, but there was something troubling about her too’. In order to ensure that his charges arrived safely in the Bahamas in 1940 Wheeler was issued with a revolver not simply for use against the Germans. ‘No, we understood that we should use those pistols against the Duke and Duchess. Better dead than in Hitler’s hands.’
It is this tantalizing version of counterfactual history – what if Hitler had won thlerubling ae war? – that has led not only conspiracy theorists but serious historians as well as novelists to give Wallis Warfield of Baltimore a deeply significant role in world history. Merely by marrying the ineffectual King she did not only England but the world a favour. His removal from the throne ensured that his own patriotism was never tested nor was the nation ruled, in the midst of an existential struggle against Nazi Germany, by a man whose intimates at times questioned his very sanity. And one does not have to believe the extreme versions of some conspiracy theorists to see the merit of such an argument. It leads to another thought about her significance. Every generation throws up an ordinary person who, through luck or circumstance or the infinitely variable nature of the human condition, diverts the course of history in unpredictable ways. In the 1930s Wallis was certainly That Woman.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor Society, an international affinity group dedicated to disseminating information about the historical importance of the lives of the Duke and Duchess through its quarterly journal and website, lists on its home page at least twenty books of fiction which use Wallis as a protagonist. The list is growing and there are dozens more books of non-fiction, some dealing with particular episodes in their lives, as well as films and plays awaiting viewing. Opinions are slowly changing. Rose Tremain, in her 2006 novella
The Darkness of Wallis Simpson
, imagines the pain of Wallis as an octogenarian whose thoughts were all twisted up, who could no longer walk unaided to the door, begging to be allowed to forget, to be allowed to die. Tremain compounds the already cruel fate of the elderly Wallis by making her character able to remember only her painful early life, while ‘the little man’, the husband who made her notorious, she cannot remember at all. It’s a sympathetic portrayal, and as such may be part of an ongoing reassessment of Wallis.
The Darkness of Wallis Simpson
, imagines the pain of Wallis as an octogenarian whose thoughts were all twisted up, who could no longer walk unaided to the door, begging to be allowed to forget, to be allowed to die. Tremain compounds the already cruel fate of the elderly Wallis by making her character able to remember only her painful early life, while ‘the little man’, the husband who made her notorious, she cannot remember at all. It’s a sympathetic portrayal, and as such may be part of an ongoing reassessment of Wallis.
Wallis saw herself as an ordinary woman, born with none of the privileges that money or good looks can bring, but possessed of insatiable ambition. So she determined to make the best of what she had and focused determinedly on a goal to enhance that. ‘I really had no idea of exactly what I intended to make of my life, but I was determined to make it a success within my capacities,’ she wrote. ‘It was not quite enough for me to be, or at least to try to be, the life of the party or to spend my existence merely taking part in good conversation. I wanted something more out of life.’
In fashioning something more of and for herself she collided brutally with others; Win Spencer, Ernest Simpson, Mary Kirk, Audrey Dechert, Foxy Gwynne, Bernard Rickatson-Hatt and Nancy Dugdale, to take a handful, found that their lives were skewed, sometimes painfully, through contact with Wallis.
Decades after her death, Wallis continues to exercise a stronger magnetism for writers than almost any other royal personality, film star or historical character. Why would a novelist, in the folds of whose rich imagination any invented character in any situation at any time in history can lurk and take shape, choose to limit his or her focus to a character, however enigmatic, who is already known? Perhaps the explanation for our fascination lies partly in the fact that she remains elusive. She is not and cannot ever be completely known. Her personality offered both light and shade, good
and evil, darkness underneath the gloss. Her life was full of adventure and travel, escape and deception – ingredients a novelist devours – and it followed a natural narrative arc, ending, in one sense, in 1936. Wallis in her lifetime defied her critics and yielded few secrets about what it was about her that forced a mhatact thatan to renounce everything he had been born to enjoy and to give up one of the most illustrious thrones in the world. Because we cannot, by any rational means, explain why a middle-aged, married woman with large hands and a mole on her chin convinced a troubled, boyish prince to believe that his life could have no meaning unless lived alongside her, novelists and playwrights, actors and historians need to dig into their imagination in order to explain it.
and evil, darkness underneath the gloss. Her life was full of adventure and travel, escape and deception – ingredients a novelist devours – and it followed a natural narrative arc, ending, in one sense, in 1936. Wallis in her lifetime defied her critics and yielded few secrets about what it was about her that forced a mhatact thatan to renounce everything he had been born to enjoy and to give up one of the most illustrious thrones in the world. Because we cannot, by any rational means, explain why a middle-aged, married woman with large hands and a mole on her chin convinced a troubled, boyish prince to believe that his life could have no meaning unless lived alongside her, novelists and playwrights, actors and historians need to dig into their imagination in order to explain it.
Wallis’s life, unbelievable in so many ways, demands both imagination and factual accuracy if any sense is to be made of it. For her appeal is not simply that a lot happened to her. Above all of this, what has made her irresistible to a wide swathe of writers and artists is her personal sparkle – the echo of her magnificent jewellery – as well as her wit, her charisma and, in the end, her courage and grace that enabled her to endure a predicament she had created for herself and live with a man she privately ridiculed. She may have been terrified of dying, but in a very real way she lives on, preserved for posterity as others saw her.
Severn Teackle Wallis (Author’s own)
House at Blue Ridge (International News Photo/Corbis)
Wallis and Alice Montague (Getty Images)
Solomon Davies Warfield (State Archives of Florida)
Alice Montague alone (Corbis)
Wallis leaving Oldfields (Oldfields School, Baltimore)
House on Biddle Street (Getty Images)
Wallis wearing monocle (Oldfields School, Baltimore)
Earl Winfield Spencer Jr. (US Naval History and Heritage Command)
Wallis as a debutante (International News Photo/Corbis)
Wallis as Win’s bride (Getty Images)
Mrs Wallis Spencer and Lt Alberto Da Zara (Diana Hutchins Angulo)
Wallis in the blue tiara (Cartier Archives)
Three generations of royalty (Corbis)
The young Prince of Wales (Corbis)
Mr and Mrs Ernest Spencer at court (Private collection)
Wallis and Edward on the
Nahlin
cruise (Corbis)
Nahlin
cruise (Corbis)
Wallis looking pensive (Getty Images)
Bracelet of crosses (Cartier Archives/Louis Tirilly)
Married at last (Corbis)
Wallis, Edward and Hitler (Getty)
Mary Kirk (International News Photo/Corbis)
Duke, Duchess and Fruity Metcalfe (Getty)
Wallis making up packages for the troops (Getty)
Duke and Duchess on their way to the Bahamas (Corbis)
Wallis in Red Cross uniform (Gometiightetty)
Wallis and Eleanor Roosevelt (Associated Press)
Duke with Queen Mary (Corbis)
The new Mr and Mrs Ernest Simpson (Private collection)
One of Ernest’s personal favourites (Private collection)
The house in the Bois-de-Boulogne (Getty)
Reception in Miami
by Jack Levine (Hirshhorn Musuem & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, gift of Joseph J. Hirshhorn, 1966)
by Jack Levine (Hirshhorn Musuem & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, gift of Joseph J. Hirshhorn, 1966)
Wallis taking charge (both Corbis)
Duke, Duchess and Ben Hogan (courtesy of the Greenbrier Hotel)
Duke and Duchess dancing (courtesy of the Greenbrier Hotel)
A selection of Wallis’s Cartier jewels and original sketches (Cartier Archives)
Duchess at the New Lido Revue (Getty)
Duchess and Aileen Plunkett (Getty)
Wallis at Queen Mary centenary commemoration (Corbis)
Frail Duke leaving a London clinic (Corbis)
Duke’s funeral, 5 June 1972 (Corbis)
Duchess looking haggard (Getty)
Duchess’s funeral, 30 April 1986 (Getty)
No one who researches the life of Wallis Simpson can go far without looking at letters between Wallis and Edward, many of which have been edited by Michael Bloch. My first debt is to him for this sterling work which has been an invaluable guide over the last years in my quest to understand Wallis and for allowing me to quote from these. For help with understanding the British political situation in 1936, especially with respect to Stanley Baldwin, I owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to Professor Philip Williamson, Head of History at Durham University, who has not only given up valuable time to talk through some of the issues and discuss current historical interpretations with me but has also located photocopies of documents far beyond any reasonable expectation of a biographer. I have relished our (for me) all too brief conversations and thank him most warmly for sharing his scholarship with me. I want to thank Aharon Solomons, the son of Ernest Simpson and Mary Kirk, who not only opened up his home in Mexico most generously to me, but set me on a new path to seeing Wallis Simpson and her second husband in a different light. He I thank most warmly for some unforgettable conversations and I also thank Maria-Teresa (MT) Solomons for showing me some letters and photographs. I especially want to thank Pascale Lepeu, Curator of the Cartier Collection, for a wonderfully enjoyable day seeing the Collection and Michele Aliaga at the Cartier Archive for generously making available so many wonderful Cartier images, some of which magnificently enhance this edition. My thanks also go to Erika Bard, who has once again provided me not only with original thoughts about and psychological insights into the behaviour of my subjects but has also given me suggestions for further examination.
There are others whom I woul had like to thank publicly for enormous generosity and concern for historical accuracy but who have requested anonymity. They know who they are.
I have consulted a number of libraries and archives in the hunt for new material and would particularly like to thank the Master, Fellows and Scholars of Churchill College, Cambridge and the staff of the Churchill Archives Centre especially its Director, Allen Packwood, Natalie Adams, Andrew Riley, Sophie Bridges and Katharine Thomson for their unfailing help and cooperation, especially in trying to ferret out unpublished material, newly released documents or helping me locate those due for reclassification through Freedom of Information requests while I was writing this book. For permission to quote from the Spears Papers, housed at Churchill College, I thank Patrick Aylmer and for permission to quote from the Lascelles Papers also held at Churchill College I thank the Hon. Caroline Erskine.
I also owe a debt to the staff at the National Archives in Kew who made my work more pleasant in innumerable ways and would like especially to mention Mark Dunton who, seeing my dismay at the prospect of consulting endless files on microfilm – so dispiriting for all researchers – encouraged me to seek permission for original documents to be brought up from the vaults including the evocative, leather-bound Cabinet Office minutes and Conclusions to Cabinet Meetings. Seeing the originals in this way adds enormously to any author’s ‘feel’ for the period and an understanding of the drama of events as they unfolded.
The London Library is, as ever, a most wonderful resource and again, its staff have found books that eluded me or books kept on special reserve, as did also the helpful team at the British Library. My days at the Bodleian always seemed to be accompanied by freezing weather and snow, especially testing as the collection was being moved from its permanent home to a temporary building demanding permanently open doors. But here too I encountered warmth from helpful librarians, especially Colin Harris, Helen Langley and Rebecca Wall. At Balliol College, which owns copyright for some of the Monckton Papers, my thanks go to Anna Sander. I must also mention the Highland Park Historical Society, in particular Jean Sogin and Julia Marshall, while Dorothy Hordubay, Joan Jermakian and Judy Smith are just three among the thoughtful and kind staff at Oldfields School, Baltimore, where Gentleness and Courtesy are still the rule. At the Maryland District Historical Society, Marc Thomas has been most helpful. Lambeth Palace Archives have been a delight to discover and my thanks go to the efficient and helpful staff there too. Thanks to the Radcliffe-Schlesinger library for permission to quote from the Hollingsworth-Kirk family archive and to the Osbert Sitwell estate for permission to quote the poem Rat Week. My thanks to Miss Pamela Clark at the Royal Archives for permission to quote from a letter and memorandum from King George VI. In New York I was privileged to meet Kirk Hollingsworth, nephew of Mary Kirk, who cast his mind back many years on my account, went to great trouble to ferret out unpublished material for me (Notes for Lady Donaldson) and grant me permission to publish that for which he owned copyright while pointing out that some comments ascribed to Wallis in these notes were Buckie’s memory of what Wallis wrote but that he believed her memory was usually accurate. I have made strenuous attempts to contact all other copyright holders and if there are any I have inadvertently missed I will rectify this in any subsequent editions.
Many others have contributed to my understanding of this complex woman whose story is set against a critical period of world history or have helped me in other ways with my work. Iithted should like to thank Diana Hutchins Angulo, Vicki Anstey, Andrew Barber, Damian Barr, Philp Baty, Francis Beckett, Chris Beetles, Jeremy Bigwood, Xandra Bingley, Marcus Binney, William Boyd, Piers Brendon, Victoria Buresch, Julia Cook, Stephen Cretney, The Lord Crathorne, Guiseppe D’Anna, Andrew Davies, Spencer Doddington, John Entwistle, Jonathan Fenby, Susan Fox, Mark Gaulding, Sir Martin Gilbert, Laura Gillott, Vicky Ginther, Tim Godfray, Veronica Franklin Gould, Vanessa Hall Smith, Fred Hauptfuhrer, Nicholas Haslam, Angela Holdsworth, Dr Christopher Inglefield, Tess Johnston, Hans Jorgensen, Hector Kerr-Smiley, Dixie de Koning, Lee Langley, the late Walter Lees, Jonathan Leiserach, Richard and Midge Levy, Mary S Lovell, Andrew Lownie, Paul Masai, Neil McKenna, Linda Mortimer, David Metcalfe, Shelagh Montague Brown, Charlotte Mosley, Margan Mulvihill, Pamela Norris, Dr Iain Oswald, John Carleton Paget, Lady Camilla Jessel Panufnik, Della Pascoe, Martin Pick, Michina Ponzone-Pope, Lucy Popescu, David Prest, David Pryce Jones, Jane Ridley, Susan Ronald, Dr Domenico de Sceglie, David Seidler, Harriet Sergeant, William Shawcross, Polly Schomberg, Brian Smouha, Rory Sutherland, Professor Miles Taylor, John Toler, Rose Tremain, Bernard Wasserstein, Esther Weiner, Alison Weir, Kenneth Wolfe, Lindy Woodhead, Philip Ziegler.
A special mention must go to the Ritz hotel, Wallis’s favourite haunt and the setting for many important unrecorded conversations in this story. Here I am indebted to Stephen Boxall and Amber Aldred for allowing us to film in their wonderful rooms and of course my thanks to John Stoddart for several terrific photos at the Ritz.
As ever, I owe gratitude to my dynamic agent, Clare Alexander, who always understood what a rewarding project I would find immersing myself in this examination of a woman and period in history. Her colleagues, especially Leah Middleton, Lesley Thorne and Cassie Metcalfe-Slovo, have all looked after me with concern and interest. Simon Berthon, too, has been excited by this story from the outset and immediately recognised the significance of the
new material which was both heartening and stimulating. I have benefited enormously from discussions with him about
That Woman
over the past years and months. Peter James, my copy editor, deserves a special thank you for his unrivalled clarity of vision and for nobly giving up his weekends for
That Woman
. I am fortunate that once again Douglas Matthews has been prepared to offer his matchless indexing skills, and I thank him for this. At Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Alan Samson, Martha Ashby and Elizabeth Allen have displayed equal amounts of enthusiasm, inspiration and dedication, which have made working on the f
inal stages of
That Woman
the sort of pleasure and delight which have made me the envy of my colleagues.
new material which was both heartening and stimulating. I have benefited enormously from discussions with him about
That Woman
over the past years and months. Peter James, my copy editor, deserves a special thank you for his unrivalled clarity of vision and for nobly giving up his weekends for
That Woman
. I am fortunate that once again Douglas Matthews has been prepared to offer his matchless indexing skills, and I thank him for this. At Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Alan Samson, Martha Ashby and Elizabeth Allen have displayed equal amounts of enthusiasm, inspiration and dedication, which have made working on the f
inal stages of
That Woman
the sort of pleasure and delight which have made me the envy of my colleagues.
At the risk of embarrassing my family I must thank them all publicly for assistance of many kinds, especially technical. My children – Adam, Amy and Imogen – all have full lives and there have been times when my absence for research has been less than helpful. But above all heartfelt thanks to my husband, Mark Sebba, who, in addition to constant emotional support, has given me the key to open many doors into the world of fashion which Wallis would have relished.
In spite of freely acknowledging all the help I have received from those named above, any errors in the following pages are of course my own.
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